A June 28, 2007 article in The Washington Post related how a United States Department of Homeland Security contract with Booz Allen increased from $2 million to more than $70 million through two no-bid contracts, one occurring after the DHS’s legal office had advised DHS not to continue the contract until after a review. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the contract characterized it as not well-planned and lacking any measure for assuring valuable work to be completed.[70]
In June 2013, Edward Snowden—at the time a Booz Allen employee[80] contracted to projects of the National Security Agency (NSA)—publicly disclosed details of classified mass surveillance and data collection programs, including PRISM.
In 2023, Booz Allen agreed to a $377 million settlement over allegations that it had fraudulently billed the US government from 2011 to 2021, one of the largest procurement fraud settlements in history, without admitting civil liability.[93] The settlement was the result of an investigation sparked by a whistleblower and former Booz Allen employee, who noticed that the firm was overbilling the US government in 2016.[94] The whistleblower said that Booz Allen lowballed the cost of work done with foreign governments and corporations, then lumped the costs it incurred together with US government contracts to bill to the US government.[93] The whistleblower initially alerted colleagues of the overbilling, but says that she was told that the Department of Defense was “too stupid” or “not smart enough” to catch Booz Allen and recover the money.
That’s the sad part